| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence. By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. x, 357 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-300-07474-3.)

In this survey of more than two centuries of American secret intelligence, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones employs the confidence man as his leitmotif. With the exception of George Washington, he argues, U.S. intelligence practitioners have consistently exaggerated menaces in order to lobby for expanded budgets and greater political importance--while not necessarily becoming more effective at countering real threats. Moreover, they have exploited intelligence 'failures' to argue for more influence. 1

One such confidence man was Allan Pinkerton, who briefly headed the Union's secret service agency during the Civil War and claimed he helped prevent the murder of the president-elect in 1861. He then used the actual assassination of Abraham Lincoln to confirm the importance of his intelligence work. Another was the notorious Herbert O. Yardley, who led the government's short-lived 'black chamber' after World War I and boasted of its Japanese code-breaking successes. After he published a best-selling, self-aggrandizing book containing numerous secrets, Congress passed the Yardley Act to stop further revelations. It was not yet known that Yardley had also sold secrets to Japan. . . .

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